In reviewing my bucket list, I’ve realized that I’ve been holding back on going for the big goals. The most pronounced one is dunking a basketball. I initially didn’t put it on the is the list, then had to incrementally increase the goal from tennis ball to volleyball, and only now am I accepting the reality that I will one day dunk a basketball. IF I train!!

This acceptance is big. Overcoming my internal resistance to one of my biggest dreams represents a significant change in my forward progress. I’ve been static on that for a long time. Now I’m moving. Move on one formerly impossible big goal, and then move on the next.

I’ve been static on that for a long time. Now I’m moving. Move on one formerly impossible big goal, and then move on the next.

I’ve also been going through a restructuring of my time to forcefully prioritize time with my wife and daughters at the expense of time doing work for other people.

This has made me very happy. It has compounded the love I have for my girls, most potently with Isla. I have historically shut her out the most in order to work, and giving her my full attention has felt really good.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that earning Isla’s love is the most important thing to me, because I can see how it’s possible to miss out, even a bit, and not do as good a job as I could have, and fucking regret that.

Same goes for Lia and Lake. But right now Isla, at the stage she’s at, seems most urgent.

Following my bucket list goals to their ultimate conclusions, yes grossing $200K would feel amazing. As would attaining financial independence. But those without making an absolute success of my family would be damn near fucking meaningless.

Looking at it the other way around, I wouldn’t care much if I never grossed over $200K, it would be harder not to ever feel what financial independence feels like… but I’d be happy. I’d be SO happy. Like I am now.

Here’s the thing. We all play frisbee for different reasons, and my main reason is to have fun. So I don’t belong on a competitive team with winning as the primary focus. If I can win AND have fun, great. But I’d rather have a shit ton of fun, take big risks, try to build momentum and win or lose in epic fashion.

So with that in mind, I’m personally developing a playing style more aligned with massive risk-taking. This means paying way more attention to the thrower at all times, and trying to read what’s going to happen in order to do something about it. I leave my man to feel basically unguarded. Sure, I’m close-ish, but I’m playing with space. I’m poaching, trying to make my man look as attractive a throw as possible while staying confident that I can cut off the throw mid-flight. And if they throw over me, that’s more time for me to recover careless positioning.

At this point, I’d say (just as a wild guess) I’m able to see a play coming 30% of the time, and the majority of the time I’m completely wrong and out of position. But that’s OK with me, because I feel pretty strongly that if I’m able to drop my player and make an interception, the momentum gained by my team is far greater than the momentum lost by me being out of position and a pass being completed (even for a point). Being out of position is not spectacular, it doesn’t generally create a strong reaction. But bidding for an interception (and even missing) creates a sense of “swinging for the fences” that spreads throughout the team. I think this makes a team more volatile, more dangerous, and more fun.

I think it’s a mistake for a beginner team to try an play a “controlled” game. I don’t think there’s enough to be gained by playing safely, making only “sure throws” to justify that approach as a team’s strategy. New players, if given license to throw bombs in a game, gain a shit ton more confidence and valuable handling experience than if they’re pressured into always making safe throws (and dumps) to veteran handlers.

No team, ever, has been ignited by safely walking the disc into the end zone. On the other hand, even the opposing team will get up and scream for a spectacular layout D block.

Defending the end zone presents even juicier opportunities to read the play, and abandon your player, and make a bid for glory. Because you’re covering a smaller part of the field, I think it’s actually easier to poach hard in the end zone (providing you’re taking away the easy “in” throws and forcing the handler to put the disc over you, thus building the necessary time to catch up if you made a mistake).

Here’s my final argument for why poaching is better than not poaching:

Imagine a situation where all the players on the defending team are able to predict the throw a second before it’s released. This gives them all enough time to begin sprinting to the point on the field the disc is headed, leaving all players undefended but the player trying to receive the disc. Assuming the defender marking the disc doesn’t make the block, you have the defenders in immediate proximity to the handler reacting to the handler alone. This means bodies getting in the path of the throw (which we’re assuming is happening). So let’s then assume that none of those nearby defenders were able to block or intercept the disc, we now have all the mid-and-deep positioned defenders reacting to the receiver – who now has to make a fairly difficult catch due to being outnumbered by defenders. Yes, if the catch is made, the entire rest of the team is open. That’s the risk. But I still think that a team being able to collectively react to one throw at a time, and isolating/outnumbering the two offensive players involved in that pass, creates a defensive advantage. It also introduces a level of unpredictability for the offence to deal with, and as those of you who’ve played with me know, I’m a huge fan of creating a sense of chaos! I love when the other team is yelling “Man! No, Zone! No, Uh… What the fuck are they doing?”

We’ve all played “Man” and “Zone” and I think it’s time to embrace a new and somewhat random system where we’re thinking less about zones and players, and more about flight paths and developing a poaching mindset (admittedly structured almost exactly as a zone would be). I want to do some strange shit. I want to leave the handler unmarked (if we have a lead!) and double up on the in-cuts.

Today I woke up dreading another hour long workout, so much so that if I wasn’t publicly committed to doing this (and posting the video) I’d probably have skipped today altogether. So instead I’m going to change the program slightly to make it much more flexible and achievable.

Instead of doing 50 of one movement, I am now making it so I can do 50 of any movement. In my head, I was going to do 25 dips and 25 pull-ups today, and that was far more appealing than doing all 50 pull-ups only, or all 50 dips only. Doing different exercises also cuts down on the time needed between sets because you’re not necessarily using the same muscle groups. This of course cuts way down on the total length of the workout. Yesterday I was lifting for about an hour. Today I was done in about 6 minutes.

This flexibility is going to go a long way in ensuring I stick to this program long enough for it to become a habit (which, according to Google, takes 66 days). I’ll commit to posting a set of 70 videos, then deciding whether I’ve established the habit and can stop the videos or whether it’s still a struggle and I need to keep going.

Here’s today’s (much shorter) workout… with a tangent about how squirrels stay warm in the winter thrown in as bonus material:

Only a fool wants war. But once a war starts, then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy. – Derfel Cadarn (Excalibur, Bernard Cornwell)

Some things fucking suck, but we still gotta get them done. How we do these brutally painful things probably says more about us than how we do the easy stuff, the stuff we’re good at and the stuff we love.

The idea of committing to something painful and refusing to stop is well illustrated in this video of Gary V eating increasingly spicy chicken wings:

I’m always getting sucked back into my own comforts. For my family, Sunday is about comfort, taking the day slowly, and relaxing. Often we do that so well that shifting back into gear on Monday is a huge challenge. Caffeine and epic music can help grease the gears:

Then it’s a matter of getting down to the work. I’ve found that the thing I dread doing the most is the thing I should be doing. On days I’ve done well, I skip looking at emails and I go straight into doing the hardest thing. On days I don’t do so well, I end up wandering through emails and end up on chat support with an Amazon support rep trying to return a book for $8. The question I ask to determine whether I’m being productive or not is, “Does doing this activity bring me closer to where I want to be in 5 years?” If the answer is “No” the best thing to do is abandon the task and start doing something I can foresee contributing to a more successful future.

Sometimes that thing is studying a new technique or skill that will contribute to my work. Sometimes the activity is simply doing good work for a client I expect to be working for in 5 years.

Right now, the war I didn’t want is the war of Sunday Ryan vs. Monday Ryan. Monday Ryan cannot fight half-heartedly. He can’t fight with regret. He must wage war with a savage joy in defeating himself.

Fall is my favourite season, but I do get depressed when the daylight hours shorten. While I don’t necessarily suffer from full-blown Seasonal Affective Disorder (I don’t think!) I do get a little blue when I’m getting less exposure to the sun/nature/outdoors in general.

The colder weather means going outside is more of a pain in the ass. Snow and ice force me to use footwear which needs to get put on and taken off every time I indulge in some outside time. It doesn’t sound like much of a barrier – but those little inconveniences, for me, can be the difference between hours spent outside and zero time outside for days in a row. Most of the time, I just don’t do things unless it’s really fucking easy to start doing them. “Start” is the important word here, because the activity itself can be difficult. I don’t mind exercising, I maybe even like it. But if starting it is difficult, there’s little to no chance I’m going to do it. Any of it.

I used to have one of those suspension workout systems that you brace in a doorway and use the straps to do various exercises. It lived in its box, and that box lived somewhere in my closet. I never used it, and it wasn’t practical to keep in a doorway because every time I opened the door the thing would fall out and scare the shit out of me. So now I have a pull-up bar above the stairs leading to the basement (where our only washroom is). I drink lots of coffees and so I walk under the pull-up bar many times a day. I do maybe 8 pull ups a day, every other day, if that. But the difference between 8 and 0 isn’t 8. It’s fucking infinity. You can’t multiply anything by 0 to get 8. And that’s because 0 is the most worthless number in the world. People live and die by 0s. If you smoke more than 0 cigarettes, you’ll probably fucking die of lung cancer because once in a while you get drunk and smoke a pack of cigarettes and do irreversible damage to your already shitty lungs. You do that a few times a year, for your whole life, then you retire and smoke more out of sheer boredom and yep, you die of lung cancer. I don’t smoke but the above story certainly applies to me for drinking. There’s a blog post on here about me only drinking one beer or some bullshit, and I solemnly swear to you that that nonsense is over. I like to drink, and when the stars align for a night on the town, I drink like I mean it.

Zero to one kid is another infinite difference. If you have zero kids, you’re going to be pretty fucked when you get too old to take care of yourself (unless the future supplies us with free robots to change us when we shit ourselves). No amount of paid nurses will ever do as good a job of a genetically obligated successor at giving a fuck about your senile ass when dementia turns you into a wrinkled puppet for the hedonistic spirits to play inappropriate and very public sexual pranks with.

I got a bit lost there, let’s get back to talking about why fall makes me fucking miserable. I believe my daily happiness depends in large part on the inclusion of (in no particular order):

Exercise

Spending ANY amount of time outside, other than “none” (huge boost to happiness if I can absorb some sunlight into my skin and eyes)

Not being hungover (this factor is definitely increasing with age, and impacts several days at a time) / getting quality sleep

The above checklist seems pretty attainable right? It should be easy to do ALL of those things EVERY DAY if it means damn near guaranteed happiness every day. But no. I get “busy” with some bullshit on the computer and before I know it I’m redlining stress hormones and haven’t taken a real breath since waking up. I’m tense. I’m irritable. The sun has just set, it’s 5pm, and I’m depressed. So I go to volleyball and get drunk after and don’t sleep well and that fucks me for the whole next day.

Anyway this post is probably less useful than it is satirical, and I hope I made you laugh. And please, don’t feel bad for me. This isn’t me complaining, it’s just me writing openly. Today I’m happy because I actually respected my checklist. I even got some sun on my face while taking a piss in the backyard (to avoid the pull-up bar) and I got to spend lots of one-on-one time with Isla (Lia’s away for a girl’s weekend). You can’t really get too depressed when an ass-naked 2-year-old is tearing circles around the dinner table, tiny fists full of peanuts, belting out wheels on the bus for the 5000th time.

Between stage 2 and 3, when you’re underwater, that’s when everything is awesome. You’re only down there for seconds at a time, but it feels like minutes. There’s no sound at all, total perfect silence. You equalize to relieve the pressure in your ears, and you look for a big fish. When you see a monster, you shit your pants, then spear it. Everything becomes extremely simple like that and I think that’s a big part of why I’ve become obsessed.

Learning to code is like spearfishing. It requires a mental “breath hold” while you struggle to focus on solving only one thing, a small but challenging piece of a larger whole. There’s really no way of accomplishing anything if you’re not able to commit 100% of your focus while writing new code (code you’re just learning). Once that singular piece of code has been written, you get to “return to the surface” of your consciousness and breathe. Step back and run the code. If it works, it’s like you’ve hit the fish. If it doesn’t – your spear missed.

It’s interesting how coders and spear-fishers are required to totally dial their minds into doing only one thing if they hope to do that thing successfully.

This article is about how hurting yourself a little bit can turn a shitty day around.

A bad day isn’t a day that contains pain. A bad day is a day that contains no feeling at all. A totally neutral day. Frequently I have days like that, where I don’t feel anything, and for some reason I feel like shit at the end of those days. Styrofoam shit.

When people talk about how working out elevates mood, I think it’s actually that working out is painful. And you only feel awesome once the pain is gone and the endorphins come. But it was the pain that got you there. Nobody ever felt awesome after a half-assed workout.

Lately I’ve been exposing myself to pain where possible because it gives me a chance to wage war against myself, mentally and physically, and to win or lose some self-respect. If I can string together enough days where I can, for example, shower with only cold water – I seem to gain power and momentum for the rest of the day. That shower couldn’t fuck with me, so what’s next?

If I can’t take the shower I’m pretty much retreating into my shell, weakened, and certainly not feeling very powerful. Pussy Ryan won. The Ryan I want to be is nowhere to be found that day.

By default, I don’t at all want to feel pain. Nobody is wired to seek pain, we’re all wired to go for comfort and pleasure. But I make myself feel it anyway when I can bring myself to. I do this because I know the voice in my head that discourages me from feeling pain is the same voice that discourages me from taking risks, manning up, going for broke, and doing the meaningful things in my life. It’s the voice telling me to run from fear instead of smashing into it head on.

The voice is my inner wimp complaining. The voice in my head coming up with completely rational reasons not to do the belly flop (Thanks Ty!). And thanks Kyle, for leading the synchronized flopping with flawless form.

We have more respect for people who can push through pain, and less respect for wimps. Exposing ourselves to pain, even just a little, is a way to win some self-respect and the feeling of being a badass every single day. It’s a way to turn shit around if we woke up feeling like thumb-sucking infants fresh from shitting the crib, then crying about it.

With a lofty title like that I’d better deliver! Here it is, short and sweet: passion = energy. Lia and I just came to this realization after coming out of a crazy busy week where I did the unusual: I got up with Isla my fair share of the time and didn’t need a nap partway through the day.

Today was extra odd for me – I only got 6 hours of sleep (I usually need way more than this, like an embarrassing amount, I’m talking 10 hours does wonders for me). No nap, not even time to think about a nap. We were out at the farmers market then hustling to prepare for camping, building fishing spears and going for a paddle on little lake, swimming and back home for more camping prep.

It was a massive day. All things I love to do. No lack of energy.

I’ve had small days, bleak, boring days where I’ve had to drag my ass just to make it to bed at the end of it. Whatever was on tap in my body chemistry for those small, shitty, boring days – it probably resembled the dregs of morning-after beer bottles strewn about after a college party. Cigarette butts and all. Flat and gag-worthy.

Today my brain was juicing rocket fuel. And now that I have made the connection between passion and my day-to-day energy levels, I’m going to be looking for more ways of getting into shit that I can become obsessed with.

I’ll still do all the other work that pays the bills of course. Just not only that stuff.

This is one of those posts that gets weird before it gets useful. By the end of it, I hope to share with you one of the most life-altering realizations/techniques which has made me a tangibly happier man.

To start, we need to talk about psychology for a hot second. Specifically, we’ll look at 2 innate mental reflexes that must be tweaked in order to make us permanently happier. The first reflex up for modification is our hedonic adaptation. The second is our ability to visualize the future.

To be clear, this post isn’t about big, laborious or dramatic shifts in thinking. There is very little effort required here. We don’t need to go off into the mountains and meditate on mushrooms in a cave in order to make these changes to our brains. We are not monks, this is not Nirvana. We are monkeys, and this is merely a bigger stick to shove into a juicier mound of termites. I want you to think of these 2 mental techniques as being more like simple realizations, doorways into a different (and much happier) way of thinking. Simple is good. Simple can be profound. So let’s grab us a stick and get some motherfucking termites!

Hedonic Adaptation

Hedonic Adaptation is one of the great human advantages. We have this shit wired right into our core programming. Hedonic Adaptation is what allowed our ancestors to adapt to the absolute shittiest living conditions, make nature our bitch, and ultimately take over the fucking planet using only fire and stabby objects.

Hedonic Adaptation, put simply, is our ability to get used to anything. It brings our happiness levels back up after something horrible happens to us, like death in the tribe or getting our genitals mutilated by barbed wire whilst attempting to escape over the fence at summer band camp. On the other hand, Hedonic Adaptation also automatically lowers our happiness back to our normal levels after something insanely awesome happens in our lives, like finding a legit lightsaber amongst the wreckage of a UFO crash site or inheriting a sizeable troupe of (highly obedient) samurai chimpanzees. If left alone, our Hedonic Adaptation will reliably return our happiness levels to normal no matter what happens in our lives.

So how can we fuck with our hardwired Hedonic Adaptation? To start, take a coat hanger and unbend it so it’s nice and straight. Then take that twisty part that’s like a cork-screw and, with great care, guide it up your left nostril until you feel some pain. Next, find a power outlet and…

Hedonic Override

If I want to consciously override my Hedonic Adaptation, I need to have a look at my desires/appetites. If I have a shoe fetish (which clearly I do), a big part of my fetish is fantasizing about new shoes. I get a major jolt of pleasure when I buy the latest Prada Stilettos, black, because they make my calves look sexy and I can wear them with anything. But the moment those beauties belong to me, they begin losing their appeal. Hedonic Adaptation is already eating away at how happy they make me. In no time, I’m swiping through celebrity Instagram accounts hunting for my next shoe fix.

This is the common pursuit of happiness we all grow up with. Everyone we know does this to some degree, some more egregiously than others. There is this treadmill approach to happiness through creating external jolts of pleasure, as illustrated by the highly scientific and technical chart below:

You can see how the black line (a person’s happiness) is like an excited heartbeat, spiking when something good happens (like buying a brand new hot tub), then fading a little below the average happiness level as the person Hedonically Adapts, compounded by a healthy dose of buyer’s remorse upon reviewing his credit card statement. Once the hot tub no longer gives adequate pleasure, the person makes another indulgence in order to spike happiness levels again.

So apart from not ever buying hot tubs, how do we set up our happiness such that it resembles the chart below?

Here we have a nice, gradual increase in average happiness over time, with a smoother rise and fall in our high and low levels. External events still affect us, of course, but our inherent happiness is far less reliant upon our ability to repeatedly indulge our various novel appetites.

Negative Visualization

First let’s look at Positive Visualization, because that’s going to be much more familiar to us.

Positive Visualization gets shit done. We picture the job we want and we go out there and get it. We picture the person we want to marry and we don’t stop searching until we find her. We picture a big, greasy hamburger and we drive to McD’s and crush one in the parking lot with the A/C blasting into our sweaty, desperate faces.

Positive Visualization is one of the most powerful techniques humans are innately capable of. It gives us the power to create the future we’ve imagined. With our minds, we shape god damn reality as we see fit.

That all sounds awesome! So why bother with Negative Visualization? That sounds like it sucks! Why would I think about un-eating a hamburger? Why would I picture myself without a job? Why would I picture my wife leaving me for Ellen Degeneres? I imagine all of this because, however counterintuitive it might seem, picturing my situation as worse than it currently is makes me happier by making me realize what I already have. It shifts my desire away from things I don’t have, to things I do have. And while I’m visualizing not having these things, my built-in Hedonic Adaptation reflex starts adjusting to the shittier reality (if even just a little bit). Then when I come out of visualizing not having these things, I’m suddenly very grateful for having them!

Positive Visualization helps us get what we want by creating present dissatisfaction. Negative Visualization helps us want what we already have by thinking about being without it, creating present satisfaction.

OK! I Get it! Just Get to the Gummy Bears Already!

I have an almost-2-year-old daughter, Isla. Positive visualization with Isla includes seeing her, in my mind, on her first day of school, taking her to her first beach volleyball tourney, and beating her first ex-boyfriend to death with a sock full of gummy bears just so the next kid in line knows I’m not fucking around.

While these fantasies make me smile and look forward to the future, they preclude my full enjoyment of the present moment with my little lady. I believe happiness derived from the present moment always trumps happiness derived from looking forward to some future moment, or happiness derived from memories. If some kid breaks Isla’s heart, it’s way more enjoyable to actually beat said kid into unconsciousness with a sock full of gummy bears than it is to merely fantasize about it. Don’t worry – I wouldn’t actually beat a kid to death with a sock full of random gummies. I’d make sure to eat all the red ones first.

Negative visualization, by contrast, is much more morbid. Negative visualization with Isla is picturing that she’s mortal (which she is) and that one day I will hug her for the last time (which I will). Even just writing that chokes me up. But it also makes me more loving and appreciative of the sound of her little voice as, while I write this, she sings the Paw Patrol theme song:

“Da da do, da da do, da da da da da DA DOOO!”

Realizing that my time with Isla is finite motivates me to actively and immediately increase the quality of my time with her. The more often I’m able to remind myself of our limited time together, the better that time will be, and overall the happier we both will be.

Yes, thinking about the inevitability that both of us will die (and I fucking hope it’s me first) does invite a quick dose of heartache into my present moment, but the immediate payoff of being hyper-aware of my love for my little girl and the resulting (and overwhelming) joy of having the time with her that I do have, is well worth a quick look at the harsh reality of our inevitable separation.

I’m more a fan of a little preemptive sadness if it buys us a happier today. I’m less a fan of avoiding sad thoughts with the assumption that we’ll always have tomorrow.